Sunday, October 14, 2018

Booker Book #40: The Sea [Again] by John Banville

Apparently,
when white British males feel alone, they head for the sea. In this fortieth
Booker Prize winner, The Sea, by John
Banville, the protagonist Max is recently widowed, and returns to the seaside
scene of his first childhood love. Looking at just those bare bones, this book
has much in common with The Sea, The Sea
by Iris Murdoch. However, despite their similar names, the books could hardly
be more different. While Murdoch's novel is a frenetic romp, Banville's is all
melancholy lyric and languor.

Banville’s book is also similar to Holiday by Stanley Middleton, in which a man struggling with his marriage seeks solace at a childhood sea resort; and even with Troubles, by J.G. Farrell, in which the Irish conflict impinges on another seaside resort and young romance.

At The Cedars, the house once rented by his childhood love's family, Max wrestles with his
increasingly unreliable memory and retells, haltingly, two stories of loss: that of his wife Anna, and that of his first love Chloe.

The writing is beautiful and poetic. Banville makes
up words like “coldening” unselfconsciously while waxing philosophical on the
meanings of life and death, memory and imagination. And the plot twists are as breathtaking
as an undertow.